


wake up (you're missing the invasion)

by abriata



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Character Death (Impermanent), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-28
Updated: 2012-08-28
Packaged: 2017-11-13 01:22:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/497854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abriata/pseuds/abriata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Mark was born, certain things were assumed to be natural. There was magic, and there were magical creatures, and sometimes the world worked in ways that you really, really couldn't understand.</p><p>So when Mark dies on his nineteenth birthday and wakes up in bed the next morning, entirely unchanged, it's less unexpected than it could've been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wake up (you're missing the invasion)

**Author's Note:**

> For my kink_bingo square, "Penance/Punishment." Sort of a loose interpretation, but I do that sometimes. Title blame goes to [pasdexcuses](http://archiveofourown.org/users/pasdexcuses/pseuds/pasdexcuses).
> 
> Greatly inspired by [markzuckerbergs's beautiful art](http://markzuckerbergs.tumblr.com/post/27843245876/loneliness-has-always-been-with-me), which she posted just as I sat down and decided to make myself write this square. I think the inspiration it gave me is pretty evident. (AKA: if you yell at anyone, it should be her.)

  
[   
_Click for larger size at the original post_ ](http://markzuckerbergs.tumblr.com/post/27843245876/loneliness-has-always-been-with-me)

0.

When Mark was born, certain things were assumed to be natural. There was magic, and there were magical creatures, and sometimes the world worked in ways that you really, really couldn't understand.

So when Mark dies on his nineteenth birthday and wakes up in bed the next morning, entirely unchanged, it's less unexpected than it could've been.

4.

"You're not supposed to be here."

It's the beginning of the eighteenth century and Mark is over two thousand years old. The boy talking to him is no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, wide-eyed and dark-haired and naïve, if he'll talk to a stranger he stumbles upon in the untamed wilds just because they're dressed nicely. Mark considers killing him just to teach him a lesson about prudence, but that seems counterproductive since he wouldn't be capable of actually learning from it.

But this is the first time someone has spoken to him first in longer than Mark can remember, so he eventually responds, "Neither are you."

The boy tilts his head. "My family owns these lands."

Mark shrugs. For all he knows, that's true. He's never bothered keeping up with the changes of ownership around here.

"Are you lost?" the boy asks.

Mark looks at him. If he's fourteen, maybe fifteen, there's no way his family would let him wander off alone, especially if they really are wealthy enough to own all this land. They're miles from the nearest city.

"No, I'm not lost," Mark says. "Are you?"

The boy flushes, looking away. He doesn't answer.

Mark smirks and abandons his comfortable spot under his favorite tree. He bends and grabs his bag and knife, sliding it onto his belt, and then kicks at the dirt until the remains of his fire are mostly covered. When he looks up again, the boy is watching him nervously. "Come on," Mark says, "I'll take you home."

It takes them the rest of the day to get back to the boy's home. He lives in the old Cardoso house, which has apparently long since become the Saverin manor. The boy's name is Eduardo, he's fifteen, and he ran away from home but hopes to convince his parents, upon his return, that he merely got lost, because that's more shameful but less likely to get him beaten.

Mark walks him all the way to the front gates, because Eduardo insists he can't just leave again, not in the middle of the night. Their pace slows as they approach, Eduardo dragging his feet, until finally Mark loses patience and takes his elbow, dragging him along.

The gates are opened by a couple of guards, who look suspiciously at Mark. Eduardo waves them off, smiling, and tugs his arm out of Mark's grip. He straightens as they cross the courtyard, and he suddenly looks older. When he opens the door and walks inside, Mark lets himself fall a step behind.

A furious-looking man descends upon them, obviously the master of the house. Eduardo doesn't flinch, even when Mark himself almost takes another step back, and Mark revises his opinion of Eduardo.

"Come with me," presumably-Lord Saverin says, and takes Eduardo off.

Mark is left standing blankly in the entryway, trying to decide whether to leave or explore.

"Excuse me," a woman says, appearing from a side door. "You brought him back?"

"Yes," Mark says.

"I'm his mother," the woman says, as if Mark hadn't taken one look at her eyes and clothes and figured that out for himself.

"Yes," Mark says again.

She steps closer, straightening before fidgeting – with her sleeves, her skirt, her necklace. She's nervous, and Mark can see where Eduardo gets his temperament. "Thank you," she says. "For bringing him back. We were really beginning to worry. That he was found by someone who wasn't interested in hurting him or using him for his money is a relief."

Mark shrugs.

She looks taken aback. "Well," she says.

Barely refraining from sighing, Mark says, "I hate to impose, but it's late, and Eduardo offered me a room for the night."

"Oh," she says hesitantly. "Of course. I mean, we're not going to turn you out, especially when you've proven so trustworthy so far—"

"You can put me in a room that locks," Mark offers. "If you have one and it would make you more comfortable."

Contrarily, that makes her relax completely. When she smiles again, it's entirely genuine. "That won't be necessary," she says. "Can I have your name?"

"Mark," Mark says.

"No family name?" she asks.

"Not anymore," Mark says, and lets her make of that what she will.

She makes something tragic of it. Her face falls, going soft with sympathy, and she says, "I'll open one of our second bedrooms for you. I'm afraid it might be a little musty, but I'm reluctant to wake the maid this late."

"It's fine," Mark says. "I've slept in the forest the last couple of weeks." _Years_ would be more accurate, but she doesn't need to know that.

"Oh, you poor thing," she says.

Mark almost laughs. She mistakes his smile as one of friendliness, and she tucks her hand gently against his arm. Habitually, Mark relaxes enough to let her grab ahold of him.

"Tell me about yourself," she says, leading him into the back rooms of the house. "What do you do for a living?"

"I teach," Mark says, because he always ends up doing that in some capacity or another.

"Oh," Lady Saverin says, and comes to an abrupt halt at a door. "This is your room, I'll just open it and we'll get the windows open so it won't be so stifling, but do you mind me asking, are you employed right now?"

"Employed?" Mark repeats.

She releases him and opens the door, stepping briskly in and sliding one of the small windows open. Mark gets the other one and turns to face her.

"You are a tutor, aren't you?" she says.

Mark thinks of Eduardo, and sees the concern on her face, and remembers how the truth of it was that Eduardo ran away. He smiles slowly. "Yes," he says, "I am a tutor. And no, I'm recently unemployed."

"Nothing bad happened, I hope?" she says, and does indeed sound very hopeful.

"No," Mark says. "The children just outgrew their need of me. I can provide references."

"I'm sure that's not necessary," she says quickly, because of course, with a son who's just run away and been happily saved by a stranger, she's anxious to get someone to watch him. References would take too long, and there's little against Mark at this point. He's already going to be sleeping in their house. If he doesn't murder them in their beds tonight, he'll prove himself one of the best options they're likely to get.

"He needs a tutor?" Mark asks just to pry.

"Yes," she says. "And a friend."

Mark raises his eyebrows.

"But I'll let you talk to him about that tomorrow," she says, smiling sweetly. "You'll see him in the morning."

"I'm sure I will," Mark says neutrally, and she leaves him to his bed.

He barely sleeps and wakes before anyone else, when dawn is just spreading unhappy fingers through the slats over the windows. He tumbles out of bed, embarrassingly unused to not sleeping on the ground, and gropes for his one good change of clothes from his bag. Even those might be a little out of date, but they're clean at least.

He takes his clothes outside, hunting for the stream he can barely hear. He bathes quickly, toes and fingers cramping in the chilly water, and then dresses himself. He dunks his dirty clothes in the stream a few times before giving them up for lost. He returns to the compound, waving again at the sleeping guards, and hunts out Eduardo's room. He guesses it'll be near the master bedroom, where he can hear both Lady and Lord Saverin still asleep, but Eduardo's room is actually on nearly the opposite end of the house.

He doesn't bother knocking before he enters, just scrapes the heavy door open. Eduardo doesn't stir at the noise, and Mark sees why as soon as he enters the room. He's lying on his stomach and his back is red from whip marks.

It appears lying about getting lost didn't save him from the beating after all.

"Eduardo," Mark says quietly, stepping in and closing the door behind him. He wishes there were a deadbolt, but he'll make do.

Eduardo doesn't wake, not even when Mark sits at the edge of the bed. In fact, he doesn't move until Mark brushes fingers over an uninjured section of shoulder. He shifts with a murmur, and Mark gets a better grip and shakes him gently until his eyes blink open. He still wakes like a child, slow and trusting; Mark wonders how he isn't more wary, growing up in a household with a father who will whip his back raw. There are scars underneath the new marks that belie this being a rare occurrence.

"Hmm?" he slurs out, and manages to turn his head a little further to see Mark. The movement bunches the skin between his shoulder blades, and he hisses, dropping his head back down.

"Good morning," Mark says lowly. He drops off the bed and kneels by Mark's head. "How's your back?"

"Painful," Eduardo says, with an attempt at a sardonic smile. He still mostly just looks sleepy.

"I know the feeling," Mark says. He reaches up and slides the bed coverings down, revealing the rest of Eduardo's back slowly. Eduardo shakes a little whenever it catches on a welt, but he doesn't move to stop Mark.

"Taken a lot of whippings?" Eduardo asks quietly.

Mark spreads his wet shirt out over Eduardo's back. It's not a basin and washbowl, but it'll do for now. "Of course not," he says. "I have an impeccable record of good behavior."

Eduardo shivers, maybe at the cold, maybe at the way Mark is touching the back of his neck. Mark pulls his hand back anyway. "I don't believe that for a second," he says. "I'd sooner believe you're a complete outlaw."

Mark shrugs. "An impeccable enough record to get myself hired as your tutor." Eduardo goes still. Mark looks away from his back and meets his eyes. "I wanted to warn you," Mark says. "Before your mother or father brings it up. It'd be in both our best interests if they didn't know how I found you."

"I found you," Eduardo grumbles. His shoulders twitch under the shirt.

Readjusting it, Mark says, "Either way."

"Don't worry about it, someone will be in soon to help me wash it," Eduardo says. "You can take your clothes back. Get them washed."

"I need to get new ones," Mark says. "I'll just use these for rags."

Eduardo hums quietly. "Are you actually qualified to be a tutor?"

"How difficult can it be?" Mark says.

It startles a laugh out of Eduardo, which dies off quickly into a grunt of pain. "According to my old one, nearly impossible."

"I don't think you'll be too difficult," Mark clarifies, and puts his hand on Eduardo's neck again.

Eduardo shivers again, more subtly. Mark smiles at him and stands, dragging the shirt off as he goes. "I'll see you later. And don't worry, I can teach you everything you need to know."

"That sounds—" Eduardo says, trailing off as Mark reaches the door.

"Yes?" Mark asks, turning back to look at him. He's naked almost to his thighs.

"Threatening," Eduardo says. "Foreboding."

Mark shrugs again.

He waits in his room until breakfast, trying to compile a rough list in his head of what he knows. It's not entirely unlikely that the strict father might quiz him to test his credibility, and he refuses to fail. He won't let a man who beats his own children get the better of him.

He knows he has a good grasp of the classics, better than anyone else alive, but his recent history is severely lacking. There's nothing he can do about that at this precise moment, but he'll need to see what books this house has, and possibly look into acquiring more.

However, breakfast passes without incident at all. The three family members barely look at each other. Lady Saverin and Eduardo talk to each other without looking up from their plates, and Mark only gets introduced as the new tutor, which earns him a quick glance from Lord Saverin as he heads out the door barely five minutes into the meal.

"Excuse me," Eduardo says, only a few minutes later, and leaves the table too. He's fully dressed and moving smoothly, but Mark doesn't miss the slight wince as he turns to leave.

"I think this will go well," Lady Saverin says. "Eduardo seems to like you."

"I hope so," Mark says, and finishes his breakfast.

Like, it turns out, is a vast understatement. Mark didn't lie when he said he had experience as a tutor, and he is good at teaching, but while it takes him three months to refresh Eduardo on his Latin, it only takes him two to get him into bed.

Eduardo is embarrassingly easy, opening up to Mark with a trust that Mark both admires and wants to beat out of him. He suspects that's at least part of why Eduardo's father loathes him so much – he's easy to read and forever giving too much: too much information, too much emotion, too much forgiveness, just – too much. If Mark wants to beat it out of him, toughen him up to survive the world, he can only imagine how Eduardo's father must feel, relying on him to be an heir.

Eduardo tells him everything, from his younger sister who died three years before to where his father stores the family wealth, and Mark doesn't take advantage of it but he _could_ , and that's more important than the fact that Eduardo decided to trust him from the first moment they met.

But Mark doesn't want to hurt him, not really. He likes the way Eduardo waits for him, and the way Eduardo learns things he has no interest in just to please Mark. Then there are the other subjects Eduardo enjoys, which he's slightly more hesitant to tell Mark about but which, once he does, make Mark reevaluate his opinion of Eduardo's situation.

Eduardo will make a brilliant heir. He's clever, in an unconventional sort of way, and has little regard for the rules that would dictate how he should behave, but Mark has never cared about convention.

Mark starts teaching him about the world outside his father. He orders him books he'd never otherwise see, using Mark's own money, kept safe in the oldest banks in the city. He reads to him when they're in bed in languages Eduardo has never heard, and starts teaching him languages that will matter when they leave. The Eastern languages are little use to them now, but that's where Mark has decided they'll go when he convinces Eduardo to leave: to the far East, to the places Mark can only try to tell Eduardo about, and even his stories fall far short.

Eduardo gets older.

He takes on more responsibilities for his father and, with a little of Mark's help, manages to succeed at most of them. He slips up sometimes, but Mark manages to impress on him just how little it matters.

Mark buys him presents now, not just books and useful things, but pretty things, things he finds when he goes to the city and comes back a few days later. They're things Eduardo would never see without his help, because even with his family's money, they don't buy things like elaborate blank journals and pillows stitched with Latin prayers.

Eduardo never overtly asks Mark about his past life: he doesn't ask where the money comes from, and he doesn't ask whether Mark's stories are true, and he only once, in a vague, roundabout sort of way, asks how Mark came to this country and, even more obliquely, to him.

But that was after Mark had quizzed him in four different languages and then fucked him out, and Eduardo fell asleep before Mark had to come up with an answer.

Eduardo gets older still, and he's almost an adult now. His father still doesn't seem to like him, but Eduardo no longer seems to care as much. He's useful at least and he meets the majority of the expectations placed upon him, and he spends every moment he can with Mark and still lets Mark have everything he is.

For his eighteenth birthday, Eduardo lets Mark take him into the city. It's not the first time Eduardo's been, and it's not even the first time they've been together, but it's the first time they've been _alone_ , and they spend the first day of it sleeping in one of their two rooms and eating excessive amounts of bad food.

Mark is trying to convince Eduardo to leave. Now is the perfect time – Mark can withdraw all his funds, they'd have more than enough money, and Eduardo no longer looks like a child – no longer is a child. He won't leave his mother, he claims, but every time Mark asks he gets closer to agreeing, and it's only a matter of time. There are ships going out of the port almost every day, and Mark doesn't care where they go, so he's just going to keep asking, and as soon as Eduardo agrees they'll be gone, away from this horrible restrictive life Eduardo was born into and the awful father he'll never admit to hating.

But the awful father comes and ruins Mark's plans.

"What is all of this?" Eduardo's father snaps.

"Mark," Eduardo says. "Get out."

Mark has always, always left them to it. Eduardo gets his beatings and Mark helps him afterwards and that's the way they do it. Eduardo is clearly trying to get them back on plan.

But they're not going to recover from this. The room smells like sex, and their clothes are scattered all over and the bed is horribly mussed, and Eduardo's shirt is unlaced enough to show the bruises around his neck from Mark's teeth. Eduardo is never as careful as Mark, and Mark's bruises are visible even though he's fully dressed.

He'd only gone to get dinner.

"No," Mark says. "I'm staying."

"Father," Eduardo says, as his father hauls him up and grabs him by his throat, unsheathing his knife and dragging it up against Eduardo's body. Mark tenses but stays still. "Father, calm down."

"I will not," Eduardo's father says, and puts his knife against his own child's neck.

Mark should've taken them out of here sooner. Eduardo would've forgiven him for the kidnapping, but there's no way to come back if his father slits his throat.

"You're going to explain," Eduardo's father says, in a tight, dangerous voice. "And your tutor, the worthless scum, is going to keep his mouth shut."

"Don't explain," Mark tells Eduardo, and then to his father, "Are you going to kill your only son? Let him go."

"Shut up," Eduardo snaps at him. "Father, calm down, there's nothing wrong, you don't need to—"

"Are you telling me that you've never committed anything shameful with this—" Lord Saverin stalls, snarling in Mark's direction, and it looks like he can't come up with a word hateful enough to describe what he thinks of Mark. "Because if you have—"

Mark is worried about the second pause. He's worried about Eduardo, because with everything else they've accomplished, Mark has never managed to teach Eduardo to lie.

"Uh," Eduardo says, and that's all it takes.

Eduardo's father goes off on a rant, and Mark ignores him, watching his hands grab at Eduardo, knife digging slowly further into Eduardo's throat, but Mark can't see an opportunity to grab Eduardo away. Eduardo knows how to fight, and he might be able to free himself, but he'd be risking slitting his own throat and he wouldn't ever hit his father anyway.

"Let him go," Mark snaps, because blood is sliding slowly down Eduardo's neck now and his father is still screaming, and Eduardo looks blankly terrified in a way Mark has never seen.

"Don't," Eduardo spits, but his father shoves him away, with an extra kick to send him stumbling for good measure, and steps forward to slide his knife into Mark's stomach.

Mark recognizes the burning pain for what it is; he won't recover from this, not even with good medical care, and when Eduardo's father just pulls the knife out and stabs him again, Mark is almost relieved. He'll die more quickly.

The next two stabs are a little excessive, in his opinion, but it's not like it matters at this point. When he's done, Lord Saverin releases Mark's arm and lets him drop to the floor. Mark goes down slowly, trying to find a way to breathe that won't make his lungs scream, but eventually gives it up as a lost cause and slumps onto his side.

Eduardo is making pathetic small noises from the bed, where he sits frozen.

"You'll be home at the end of your planned trip," Eduardo's father growls at him, and steps in front of him to yank his head up. "Your mother will be told that your tutor unfortunately found better employment elsewhere, but you're old enough to finish your studies anyway. I'll deal with you once we're home."

Eduardo only stares soundlessly at Mark, and his father storms out of the room with a derisive noise. He steps over Mark, at least, without stepping on him, which is better than Mark expected. The door slams behind him, and Eduardo is falling to his knees beside Mark.

"Oh my god," he's saying, over and over, hands hovering above Mark's side. "Mark, _god_."

Mark, groaning, rolls onto his back. His vision is going blurry. "Hey," he forces out, "hey, be quiet." He can barely breathe and he doesn't have the air to speak up.

"Christ," Eduardo gulps, and leans over him. He's crying.

Mark wants to smile. "Be quiet," he says again. "Calm down. You're not hurt."

" _I'm_ —" Eduardo gasps. "Yes, _I'm_ unhurt."

"I'll be fine," Mark grits out, but he has almost no breath left and he can't draw another one in. "Give me a few—"

"You won't be," Eduardo babbles, and his hands are frantically smoothing Mark's clothes, getting blood all over his hands. "You won't—"

But Mark can't hear the rest, and he can't force out what he really needs to say.

It probably shouldn't be, but it's a terrible surprise when he wakes up a few hours later to Eduardo's blood soaking his clothes.

Mark stares uncomprehendingly for a moment, sucking in breaths that still burn with the remembrance of the last ones he took. Then he rolls over and scrambles away, finds a corner, and vomits up everything he's eaten. He leans further over and heaves up bile, over and over, until his eyes are burning and he's choking from lack of air. Then he forces himself to take a few deep breaths and turn around.

Eduardo is still dead.

He's still dead, he's always going to be dead, and Mark – he can't believe he didn't see this coming, didn't predict that Eduardo would be stupid enough to commit suicide because of lost love. He'd always loved Shakespeare but he'd railed against the unfairness of Romeo and Juliet, and Mark had never imagined he'd be _stupid_ enough—

Mark leans back over and very carefully doesn't throw up again.

Then he takes packs their clothes and all their books and cleans Eduardo up as much as he can. He'll be damned if he'll let Eduardo's father bury him. Eduardo's father isn't going to touch him ever again.

2.

It was the night before he got married.

It wasn't permanent. And it happened again. And again. Which is not to say that Mark went around dying all the time – not very often at all. But five years after his marriage, which had been a peaceful agreement between him and his betrothed if not anything particularly desirable, the house they lived in went up in flames, along with most of the grounds surrounding it. Nobody made it out alive, not his wife or her lover or either of Mark's children.

Mark hadn't been particularly fond of her, but he'd loved them, and it may have been selfishness but when their remaining family came to clean up the grounds, Mark had let them assume his bones were buried somewhere in the wreckage.

He didn't attend his own funeral or any of theirs.

He recovered relatively quickly, more quickly than he should have, and it was probably shameful, how he relished the freedom he had for the first time in his life. He experienced the things he never could before, experienced lives he hadn't known people lived. He herded, he worked as a tradesman, a craftsman, passed ten-fifteen-twenty years drifting from profession to profession, city to city, seeing things he never could have before. He thieved for a while, unafraid of the consequences when wounds healed in a day and even death was an impermanent fixture. Cut off hands regrew just as cut off heads did, and Mark didn't know why this had happened to him, but he also didn't care.

It was thirty two years later that he finally returned to the city of his birth and discovered none of his relatives were alive. His father had passed long ago, and his mother died before he left the city the first time, right before he gave up pottery as a waste and decided to meet the sea. But his sisters were also gone now, two lost to childbirth and one, the youngest, barely more than a baby when Mark had married and left home, murdered before forty at the hands of her husband.

It was an open secret in the town, and more importantly, it was well known in the household of the widower and his new wife, she the ex-mistress. The servants weren't always happy to welcome one who wasn't their own, but Mark did good work and earned his place, and it only took him a couple of weeks to earn unfettered access.

His sister's widower taught him how to be a murderer. Mark watched him bleed out his last moments, looking pathetic in his empty bed, and was fiercely glad he'll never have to grow old. He dies with dignity, however many times he does it, and he'll never be sad and weakly useless, impotent while his younger love takes her own lover in the room right across.

He'd been considering seeking out help, an oracle or a mystic or anyone with magic, really, who might be able to point him towards some answers. He didn't know if he'd been blessed or cursed, and he had no family left; it had seemed like the appropriate time to begin investigations into what's happened to him. But the old man's death changed his mind, and weeks later, when Mark was fucking the ex-mistress for the fourth time, he decided he'll never be like him, suffering in the name of love for something so vapid and empty as the pretty blank eyes of the girl underneath him.

 

5.

He tries the northern countries first, relying on the cold to distance him as much as possible from the slow heat of Eduardo's home. He wanders for a while, avoiding towns and cities as he heads further and further north. Eventually he has to find civilization to buy supplies, because the lack of cold-weather clothes cripples him. He dies twice by freezing before succumbing to the necessity.

The town he eventually finds himself in is little more than a half-frozen fishing port. Mark digs out the little money he carries and endures the mistrustful glances as the owner of the tavern with a room to rent takes his foreign currency and lets him upstairs. Mark waves off the offer of food and collapses in the first bed he's touched since Eduardo's death months ago.

He sleeps for nearly a day and goes to buy clothes as soon as he wakes.

There's no clothier in town, no real stores to speak of, and he gets them, in the end, from a fisherman's wife. She's more than happy to be paid three times the value for a set of clothes she had been sewing for her son. Because Mark feels guilty for depriving the original recipient of a warmer coat for another week or more, he takes a trip to a larger town to buy the woman replacement fabric as well.

When he returns a few days later to deliver it, the husband and son have returned. They've got a pretty small haul, and the father is yelling at the kid for some ineptitude. The wife's eyes light up when she sees Mark, and she hurries towards him, taking the fabric with grateful hands and even more grateful words. Mark ignores her for the most part, peering around to watch the father scream at the son. The parallels aren't lost on Mark, so he understands where his interest is coming from. He swallows it back anyway and waves off the wife.

That would've been the end of it, except as he's leaving at dawn the next morning he passes them as they're loading up their small fishing boat. The father is still yelling, still, and Mark pauses as he shoves his son staggering back a few steps with a well-placed fist.

Mark's breath comes faster, and the sharp smell of brine and soft lapping of water fades, falling distant under a buzzing in his head.

The fisherman hits the kid with one of the weights for the nets.

Mark blinks and he's standing between the two of them. "Stop," he snaps. "You don't beat your children."

The fisherman snarls and curses, and tries to hit him instead. Mark has the advantage of being younger, more experienced, sober, and motivated by a stifling hate. The fisherman only has an advantage in size, and he doesn't stand a chance.

Mark only stops hitting him when the son grabs his shoulder. His face, when Mark turns and stares at him, is pale and frightened and nothing like Eduardo's.

Stumbling up, Mark backs away. "He shouldn't hit you," he says, talking too quickly, "you shouldn't let him. Protect yourself."

The boy nods frantically.

"Don't tell anyone about this," Mark adds helplessly.

The boy nods dumbly some more while his father groans at his feet. Mark has no way of knowing whether he even understood anything Mark just said, and even less guarantee the boy won't send a furious group of fishermen after him, but he nods once more and turns on his heel, heading back into the dead freezing woods.

The cold is clearly not helping. He decides to try more familiar locales.

The most familiar, of course, is home. Or what used to be home.

He recognizes some of it. The basic layouts of the cities haven't changed, though none of the buildings remain. Mark had thought some would still be standing, at least, but there are no traces of any of the places that had emotional significance for him once.

It's calming, but it's also terribly boring, and Mark only stays for a few years.

He focuses on practical matters instead. He's running low on funds. He hasn't spent much of it, or any, really, but few banks have survived the couple hundred years since he was last in Europe and even fewer kept any reliable records extending that far back. He's essentially broke again.

Larger cities are better for business. He wanders through the countries lining the Mediterranean and kills a decade that way. When he finally ventures inland, it's been fifteen years since Eduardo's death and he's in Portugal. He heads north again and works himself slowly back into society.

There's new mannerisms to learn, some that he can't pick up just by observing, particularly if he wants to reintegrate himself into the upper classes.

Eventually he winds up in England, and he loves London. It's changed a lot since he was here last; it's still filthy but less so, and there's more people and more noise and more life. He finds a comfortable shop selling books and parchment and ink with an old, lonely owner, and incorporates himself as a pseudo-heir. He inherits it and lives comfortably enough for a long time.

It's there that he looks up one morning, through the grey smoggy glass, and sees Eduardo pass.

Mark freezes and reevaluates.

He never hallucinated Eduardo, he's not prone to regret like that, and either way there's no reason he'd dream of him like that, older and paler and English.

Scrambling to his feet, Mark almost falls out the door of the shop. "Excuse me," he says, "pardon me."

Several people turn to look at him, but not the person he needs. Mark ignores the glares and startled stares he earns as he shoves through the crowds on the dirty street.

"Excuse me," he spits again, much more sharply, and reaches out to touch not-Eduardo's shoulder.

He jerks to a stop and turns to stare at Mark. He's got a companion with him, a smaller man, who immediately demands to know who Mark thinks he is.

"I need to talk to you," Mark says.

The questioning smile on not-Eduardo's face fades as he stares just as intently back at Mark. He frowns a little. "Do I know you?"

His companion shoves Mark's hand off not-Eduardo's shoulder. "Excuse us, sir," he snaps.

Mark can't lose him, not without talking to him.

"Excuse us," the companion says again, and starts to pull them away.

Not-Eduardo stares a little longer, looking puzzled, and lets himself be pulled.

Mark loses them in the London crowd not long after.

He forces himself not to think about it. Instead, he spends the night reviewing the shop's finances, and decides to expand the business.

He'll need to meet with bankers, find a promising new location or two. In order to do that, he'll need someone to watch the front end of the shop for him. He hires two, eventually, a homeless young woman off the streets who looks terrified and unbelievably grateful when she discovers he isn't interested in her prostituting herself. The second is an even younger boy who Mark catches attempting to steal from him.

He spends two weeks emphatically not thinking about not-Eduardo.

And then he meets with the second banker.

The first one laughs him out the door, uninterested in his business and calling him too young. In the second, he has an appointment with a Mr. Williamson, who has a reputation around town for being a near pushover.

Mark has high hopes for the meeting. He gets shown into a small, comfortable back office and offered a seat, which is considerably higher-class than he was expecting. He leans forward and peers at the open bankbooks on the desk, looking for clues as to what approach might earn him the best reception. He sits back quickly when the door behind him opens again but refuses to turn around.

"Sir, our apologies for the wait, but Williamson became ill," says a familiar voice. Mark jerks upright. "I'll be happy to assist you today."

Mark cranes to look at not-Eduardo walks around the side of the chair. He stares.

Not-Eduardo recognizes him, too, pausing visibly and clearing his throat. He carries on quickly. "I'm Mr. Saverin, would you like to tell me why you've come to see us today?"

"Business expansion," Mark says numbly. "Saverin?"

Not-Eduardo sinks slowly into the chair behind the desk. "Yes," he says faintly. "You're—"

"Mark," Mark says, and watches for a reaction. He gets none.

"At your service," not-Eduardo says. He shakes his head and smiles more brightly when he meets Mark's eyes again. "Now, about this expansion—"

"What's your given name?" Mark interrupts.

Not-Eduardo looks shocked.

"Yes, I'm being rude," Mark says. "What is it?"

"Have we met?" not-Eduardo asks hesitantly.

"A few weeks ago, are you stupid?" Mark snaps. "What is it?"

"Eduardo," not-Eduardo says, and Mark—

He has no idea what he's supposed to do with this.

He's been alive for two millennia and he has never seen any hint of reincarnation before. Back when the world was smaller he should've – but where were his sisters or mother or father, his wife or children?

If he could've found any of them again, he would've chosen Eduardo, but that doesn't make the mystery any less frustrating or unbelievable.

And this Eduardo isn't _his_. He's older – not by a lot, but a good decade past any age the real Eduardo saw. He has the beginnings of faint lines around his eyes and mouth, and he looks settled and happy in a way Mark's Eduardo never could have.

"I meant," Eduardo says, "had we met before that?"

Mark says, "No," and stares until Eduardo drops his eyes and proceeds with their business, stumbling and clueless. He still smiles brightly at Mark when he leaves.

Mark sees him again when he returns to sign the loans. Normally a lawyer external to the particular transaction would handle it, but Eduardo is there again. He stands sort of uselessly to the side but watches Mark carefully the whole time. The grumpy, half-blind lawyer shuffles out of the room before either of them. The door swings all the way shut behind him before either of them move.

"Well," Eduardo says finally, smiling falsely. "I wish you the best of luck with your business venture, Mr. Elliot."

Mark catches his wrist before he can open the door. "You ought to call me Mark," he says, and then, because he has nothing to lose, he steps too close and kisses Eduardo's slack mouth.

Eduardo stiffens at first, then jerks and flails, and right before Mark gives it up for useless, his hands fumble down, catch on Mark's jacket, and clutch. He kisses back, and he's desperate as Mark's Eduardo ever was.

"Don't," Eduardo says, pulling back and breathing out shakily on Mark's face. "I can't. I have a _wife_."

"Forget her," Mark says. "She's not important."

Eduardo makes a protesting noise, half-formed words, but he kisses Mark back.

So Mark stays in London and grows his business. It takes him no time at all to adjust to Eduardo's presence – instead, Mark takes as much of him as he can, every second of the day that Eduardo doesn't insist on letting his wife have.

It's not like before, not really, not at all. Eduardo quarrels with Mark all the time, and he has his own priorities and preferences and history that Mark doesn't know.

Some things haven't changed. He still likes to spend too much time in bed, too much time bathing, and too much time getting dressed in the mornings. He still likes to hear all of Mark's stories, and he still thinks they're all lies. He likes to play with Mark's curls and talk about his family – and that's yet another thing that hasn't changed: he had a troubled relationship with his father.

Now, though, when he talks about his family, it isn't just about his father. He talks about his wife, too, and how desperately he wants children. Mark grits his teeth through it, but he hates it, hates her and the unborn children, because they're the reason Mark knows this Eduardo will never run away with him.

And then the wife finally does get pregnant. Eduardo doesn't stop visiting Mark or anything that drastic, but he does spend less time with him. He also starts trying to convince Mark to meet his wife, because he loves them both and he won't, can't, ever tell her but he wants Mark there in some capacity.

It's when he announces his intention to make Mark the godfather that Mark leaves.

He just goes on vacation; it's entirely normal. He's wealthy and single, and, for all appearances, young. It's almost expected that he'll tour Europe.

When he returns, Eduardo's child has celebrated its first birthday and Eduardo just stares at him. "You—," he says, and his voice breaks.

"It's nice to see you again," Mark says mildly.

Eduardo shuts the door in his face.

That night, as Mark is airing out his long-abandoned apartment, there's a knock.

"Did you lose your key?" he asks, opening the door for Eduardo.

Eduardo doesn't answer, too busy collapsing into Mark's arms.

Later, when Eduardo finally releases his stranglehold on Mark's middle and raises his head from his neck to speak, Mark asks again. He doesn't particularly care – he can get another key – but they need something to talk about while he pets Eduardo's shaking back and doesn't think of the small toddler he'd glimpsed clutching a doorframe behind Eduardo's feet.

"I threw it out," Eduardo says. "I thought you were dead."

"I'd still come back," Mark says.

Eduardo groans. "You and your stupid stories."

"They're not stories," Mark says.

Eduardo lifts his head. "I've never been able to tell if you're delusional or you think I am."

"Look at me," Mark says.

Quizzical, Eduardo tilts his head.

"How old were you when we met?" Mark asks, though he knows the answer.

"Twenty-four," Eduardo says. He starts to frown.

"And now you're twenty-six," Mark says. "How old did you think I was when you met me?"

He can hear Eduardo swallow. "Young," he says.

"And now," Mark says.

"Young," Eduardo repeats, and, more quietly, "Younger."

"They're not stories," Mark says.

Eduardo believes him. He spends the next two weeks clinging frantically to Mark, until he comes shamefacedly the last day and admits he needs to spend time with his distrustful wife and child. He tries to weasel out a promise that Mark will visit. Mark turns him down.

It's only six months before Mark leaves again. Eduardo gets more and more insistent that Mark needs to come meet his goddaughter, the beautiful little spawn, and Mark won't. He leaves because Eduardo says he owes it to him. He says Mark has to come, because Mark isn't aging and never dies, and Eduardo is aging, and Eduardo doesn't want Mark to be alone when he's gone. He wants to give Mark his family.

Mark is so furious he throws Eduardo out of his apartment and leaves for another year.

He comes back, and Eduardo is older still, and he's learned not to say anything. He never asks Mark why he bothers to stay.

Mark never meets either of his children. He only has one more, because one night three years later he's walking his daughter home from a street fair and there's a fight. Eduardo gets caught in the middle – maybe trying to help, maybe trying to save his daughter, Mark is never able to find out – and he dies. Mark can't go to the funeral because he isn't family. He knows that if he'd let Eduardo introduce him, he could've been there that night; Eduardo wouldn't have died from one small knife wound.

6.

Mark doesn't believe that Eduardo's appearance was an accident. He's been around for millennia and Eduardo was the first one he saw again, and with almost the exact same identity – that's not a coincidence.

So when Eduardo dies the second time, Mark spends two weeks grieving and releasing himself from his business. He's not going to fake his death, though he's done it before, because nobody would believe young Mark Elliot has a fully-grown son, not yet. Instead he appoints new managers and makes it clear he'll be providing the minimum amount of input from a distance as he travels.

Then he goes hunting for Eduardo.

He has no idea when or where he might find him, so his wandering is mostly aimless. However, though he isn't ready to leave Europe yet, he wants out of England, so he goes to the continent.

There's nothing there. He corresponds for two decades with decreasing regularity and starts dropping suggestions in his letters about his family, until finally he tells his lawyer – from a firm entirely unrelated to Eduardo – that he has an heir, Mark Elliot the third.

He's learned that senior and junior is hard to carry on, but it's easy to excuse the reuse of names if the supposed child is the fifth or sixth in a long line.

He starts going further and further afield. He tries Russia and starts to venture into Asia, before deciding that he doesn't have time before he'll need to reveal himself as Mark Elliot's heir to a new lawyer in London. He begins his journey back home, traveling a route that takes him through Italy to Portugal and Spain. He's not ashamed to acknowledge that he thought those were likely places Eduardo would be and he saved them for last deliberately.

He's got an appointment in a month with a new attorney to whom he'll be transferring his business because his "father's" lawyer has died. He's supposed to leave on a boat from Le Havre in two weeks. He's currently in Paris, staying in a small hotel on the edge of the city. He spends the nights wandering, watching the most illegal corners of the city shine, and the days sleeping or hiding from the servants that want to make him comfortable.

It's on one of his nightly wanders that he stays out too late, until dawn has passed and the earliest people are starting to crowd his quiet, when he glances behind him and sees Eduardo.

He shouldn't even recognize him. This isn't Eduardo as he's ever seen him. This is Eduardo as a seven or eight year old child, clutching the hand of a woman who is obviously his nursemaid, and he's grumpy and sleepy and complaining in fluent French about being dragged out of bed. He's right about that, at least – he should barely be out of the house at his age, never mind with only a nursemaid for company.

Mark steps into a side alley and waits, letting them pass. He follows them.

They're going because the nursemaid promised little Eduardo she'd take him to a market, Mark guesses, because they stop in a small cluster of street stalls and then stand there while little Eduardo stares around, wide-eyed. Despite his complaints, it seems as if the nursemaid is only catering to him.

Mark knows from experience that's a bad idea. Eduardo always goes too far when given his head.

Still, they leave soon enough, and the maid sneaks him back into a large manor at the edge of the city. Mark can't go into the house with them, and he's frustrated; he wanted to watch little Eduardo more closely, determine who he is and his proper age.

He's just settled himself in to sit at the gates to the property when a window near the top of the house opens and little Eduardo's head pops out. He looks right at Mark, and, when Mark looks back, nods and waves emphatically. Then he disappears again.

The window is still open, and the house is really easy to climb. Mark takes the invitation for what it may not have been and lets himself into little Eduardo's nursery.

"You followed us," little Eduardo says by way of greeting, in a solemn voice that makes Mark want to laugh. Eduardo has never before been so capable of sounding quite so severe, even with two decades extra maturity.

"Yes," he answers and sits on the windowsill.

"My maid didn't notice," Eduardo says. "I suppose it's a good thing you didn't want to rob us."

"I may still want to rob you," Mark says. "I may be planning on taking everything from this house."

"No," little Eduardo says assuredly. "And besides, you'd never get away with it."

"You're so certain," Mark says, a little pleased. "Aren't you afraid of me?"

"No," little Eduardo says. "Though maybe I should be, since I don't know you."

"You know me more than you think," Mark says. "Though I know you even better."

"I don't believe you," little Eduardo says.

"Your name is Eduardo Saverin," Mark says, taking the risk.

"You could've researched my family," little Eduardo says. "Or talked to any of the servants downstairs."

"You don't have a favorite book, partly because you like everything you read and partly because you never finish reading anything you start, and you don't know the ending to anything," Mark says. "You don't get along with your father."

Little Eduardo goes still. "How do you know about my father?"

Mark almost laughs. "It's a constant," he says. He kneels on the floor in front of little Eduardo.

"You're a very odd person," little Eduardo says, and inclines his head politely in return.

"You have no idea," Mark says.

He doesn't become Eduardo's tutor.

In fact, he doesn't become Eduardo's anything. He's learned his lesson about that. Instead, he visits for a few hours every day, in the hours when Eduardo is just waking or supposed to go to sleep, in some of the many hours that Eduardo's parents and servants won't notice his attention and energy is elsewhere.

Mark never goes to London for his business. He has the majority of his wealth transferred to French banks, since it looks like he'll be staying for a while.

He does try to keep as much distance as he can force himself to have. He doesn't tell Eduardo about himself, and he doesn't tell Eduardo why he spends time with him; he doesn't even tell Eduardo his name. He suspects Eduardo thinks he's some sort of supernatural creature, or an imaginary friend. Once Eduardo asks him if he's an hallucination, and seems quite proud of himself for figuring out what Mark is, until Mark points out that, if he is, Eduardo would be the one doing the hallucinating.

Mark spends two weeks after that trying to reassure Eduardo he isn't. Worried Eduardo might ask his parents about the man that comes to his bedroom, and eager to avoid being killed, Mark gives a heartfelt promise that he's real and brings Eduardo gifts to distract him.

True to form, this Eduardo loves books, and Mark brings him all his old favorites first. Eduardo is probably just overjoyed to have access of any sort to books outside his parent's library and his schoolbooks. He starts to make requests of Mark, gradually and shyly at first, but when he warms up to it he's demanding, sending Mark away with a list of four or five books; Mark has no idea where he even hears of them. Mark does his best to bring them for him, and on Eduardo's tenth birthday Mark brings him every book of fairytales he's been able to find for the last two years, saving them up for today.

When he gets to the house, however, sneaking around to the back corner where he always finds entrance, it's deserted.

Like most of Paris, Eduardo's family has left, frightened of the social upheaval. Mark always ignores these things, because they always end eventually and never affect him much at all, but he never stopped to consider that Eduardo's family wouldn't be so unconcerned.

There's no guarantee Mark will be able to find them, but he can guess the route they would've taken to get out of the city. He leaves the books in Eduardo's room and follows.

He probably should've been expecting it.

He finds Eduardo's nurse first, looking almost the same as she did the first time Mark saw her. There's nobody with her, but there's tracks through the dirt and filth lining the road. Mark wonders if Eduardo's parents left her as they escaped or if he passed them already without realizing it. He thought he would've recognized them, but he's been focused on looking for Eduardo.

Yards into the woods, Eduardo is curled up against a tree. He's limp and unmoving, and his eyes are closed. Mark touches him anyway, just to be certain.

His body is already cooling. Mark sits back on his haunches, scrubs his hands over his face. It should be easier. He's only known Eduardo for a couple of years, it should barely _matter_. He's seen so many people die.

But he's never had to watch one person die three times, and maybe that's the problem.

3.

As the centuries pass, Mark gains and loses fortunes, gains them again and deliberately squanders them. He learns it's better to have money than not, but diametrically, it's better to be too dumb than too smart. You can always play poor if you have money, but the reverse isn't true; you can always brush off uncomfortable insights as stupidity but intelligence and experience get him killed more times than he can count.

He spends a long time learning how to navigate an endless stream of identities, reluctant to but deprived of any other option. It isn't too long before he starts trying to leave his mark on the world: he's this king's advisor, that civilization's most famous heretic. None of it sticks. Whatever he does manage to leave behind (and there's precious little) gets twisted and warped, until even he can't recognize the truth in it. It takes a long time, but Mark learns his lesson. He steps back and watches the world, sure of his place if only because it's not possible for him to ever really lose it.

The world changes, growing up around him.

They discover a new world, and Mark is excited. It takes him the whole journey over to understand that's what he is, because it's been so long since he's felt anything like it.

But a few decades later and the new world is just like the old one, but wilder, vicious and unhappy. It's still boring, but it's not _as_ boring, and Mark stays.

8.

Mark has had enough. He's not going to look for Eduardo if all he gets to do is watch him die. He'll find other things to do, but he's not going to find Eduardo, not to be his lover or his friend.

He goes to America. Europe is in upheaval and America is a good place to get away from everything he's too familiar with.

He has to start over, he's not going to be getting any of his money from the French banks now, but that's okay. He's used to it, and he's in good company. Everyone he meets is just starting out. He works as a servant for a while, moving from household to household, from town to town as he works his way south.

He's not looking for Eduardo. There's no guarantee he'd find him anyway, and certainly not this soon, but just to be careful he occupies himself with other people.

There are other servants, and boys and girls in the city, and new people arriving daily. None of them look like or have children that are Eduardo. He settles, finally, in Massachusetts, because it's got history and some pathetic attempt at culture and it's one of the major centers of transportation so if he ever wants to, it'll be easy enough to leave.

It's the turn of the century when Eduardo stumbles into Mark's life.

Mark doesn't ask for it, and he's entirely unprepared when ten-year-old Eduardo shows up on his doorstep, looking for all the world as if he's stepped right out of France.

"Excuse me," he says. "I have a letter for your mistress."

Mark takes it with numb fingers. Young Eduardo smiles at him brightly and runs off to his next errand. It takes Mark almost five minutes to remember to shut the door.

Eduardo is recently orphaned, and his job as a messenger takes him all over the city. Mark avoids him as much as possible, but he delivers to their house and he seems to have an unnatural fixation on Mark – the other servants always say he asks about him, and Mark can't put him off, even when he's deliberately mean. Eduardo just smiles at him hopefully and tells him he'll see him the next time.

But eventually, Eduardo doesn't show up the next time. Mark hears from one of the maids that he got caught in a street brawl and stabbed to death.

He isn't surprised, but he leaves for Chicago the next day.

From there, wherever he goes Eduardo follows. He can't seem to avoid him.

Twenty years later in a back alley, and teenage Eduardo is getting robbed. Mark steps in on instinct, but he's too late.

Ten years after that, and Eduardo and a friend are on the streets. Mark has invested again, and he owns a significant portion of the shipping and steel industries, at least in this small Missouri town; he takes them in. The friend is frightened of him and Eduardo adores him. Mark starts to wonder if people really do remember their past lives.

The friend eventually reveals himself to be otherwise: six months since Mark started caring for them, and he's begun teaching them, hoping to get them into proper school soon, and the friend wants to steal Mark's belongings and take off. Eduardo tries to stop him, and doesn't live to regret it. The kitchen knife is still in his stomach when Mark goes into his study and finds him.

But the civil war thirty years later is worst.

Mark fights, because he hasn't seen Eduardo in decades and there's no reason not to, and he's tired of sitting on the sidelines watching the world change. He wants to be instrumental to it. But when everyone around him is dead and he starts trying to stumble his way out of the woods, two years into the war, and he finds an older Eduardo leaning against a tree and clutching his profusely bleeding leg.

Eduardo doesn't cringe when he sees Mark. If anything, he relaxes further against the tree. Then he smiles a little.

Mark closes his eyes and swears roundly before, as always, moving to help him.

There's an abandoned house a few miles away. Mark has to help drag Eduardo there, but it's shelter and there's some food. Mark builds a fire and sets pot of water to boil, and then finally turns to Eduardo.

"Hello," Eduardo says, after a slight pause wherein Mark says nothing. "Can I ask why you've saved one of your enemies?"

"You're not my enemy," Mark says.

"I know," Eduardo says, casual and breathtakingly honest, and smiles again. "I'm afraid I am about to pass out, though."

He does, and meanwhile the water boils. Mark takes his knife and cuts Eduardo's pants leg off, revealing the rotting flesh underneath. It's obviously an older wound, probably by days, and the infection stinks. Mark wets a rag in the cooling water, scrubbing the area clean as possible. He cleans his knife and, while Eduardo is out, scrapes away as much of the dead flesh as he can.

He cleans inside the wound. It's a nice long gash, possibly from a bullet, and it's gotten half his thigh. Every spare scrap of cloth Mark has is red by the time he's done.

Eduardo wakes up as Mark is pouring some of the whiskey from the cellar over it. He blinks his eyes open and then, belatedly, groans and twitches away.

"I'm done," Mark says dryly. "Eat."

Eduardo does. He watches Mark the whole time, blatantly staring, and Mark finally stares back in self-preservation. This Eduardo is older than any of the ones he's seen in a while – maybe older than Eduardo was when he died in London.

"What's your name?" Eduardo asks. "I should know what to call you if you're saving my life."

"Mark," Mark says. "And I'm not saving your life. Your wound is septic."

"Oh," Eduardo says. He stares off at the wall for a moment. "I should've known that."

"No way to know," Mark says. "Not if you don't have experience with it."

"You do?" Eduardo asks.

Mark shrugs.

"How long?" Eduardo says.

"I don't know," Mark says. "I don't have _that_ much experience." When he gets any serious wounds he just kills himself and gets it over with. He's never experienced a slow death like Eduardo is facing.

It gets worse over the next two days. Not just Eduardo's wound – Eduardo talks almost constantly, at least at first. Later, the fever spreads, and he spends longer periods just sleeping or trying to sweat it out, but for the first day he tells Mark his whole life story.

It's pretty much exactly what Mark expected – forced into the war, virtually clueless about how to survive, and pretty much beaten half to death even before he was mortally wounded. The inevitability of Eduardo's death doesn't make it any better for Mark to watch.

Eduardo is twenty-nine, he says, and somehow Mark isn't surprised. Then he runs out of things to say about himself, and Mark starts telling him stories. He tells him fairytales and their own history. He doesn't add any names, but sometimes, when Eduardo wakes up from the delirium, he almost thinks he remembers. He says, once, that he doesn't want Mark to have to watch him die.

"I always have to," Mark says.

They need firewood. "I'll be right back," Mark says, brushing off his knees. "It won't take long."

"I wanted to make it to my thirtieth birthday," Eduardo says. "I always saw that as some sort of right of passage. It's the age my father was when he had me. I think it's when I always assumed I'd be fully adult."

"Nobody's ever fully adult," Mark says, the secret nobody ever seems to want to say.

"Still," Eduardo says. "I'm sorry, I'm interrupting. Go get firewood."

"You never make thirty," Mark says, but Eduardo's eyes are already closing again.

He only gathers an armful of wood, because while they'll need more soon enough, he doesn't want to leave Eduardo alone for long.

Still, it's long enough. When he gets back Eduardo's hand is on the hilt of the knife buried in his body, and his eyes are open. Mark sets the firewood on the hearth and gathers Eduardo's belongings.

It takes him the rest of the night, but for the first time Mark buries Eduardo. He only does it because he thinks if he doesn't, nobody ever will. It's a poor substitute for a thirtieth birthday, but it's the best Mark can give him.

9.

It's probably too little and much too late, but Mark starts looking for a way to end his immortality. He never wanted it to begin with, so it shouldn't feel like such a huge step to say goodbye to something he didn't ask for, but the acceptance of death doesn't seem like such a horrible idea now. He's seen so much of it, after all, and he's not afraid. He's just tired.

But fifty years scouring books and questioning mediums real and fake and exploring every possible answer to be found in every part of the world, and he finds nothing. It makes him almost glad he didn't start looking earlier, since it allowed him to stave off the disappointment.

The twentieth century comes and goes, and Mark sees Eduardo a couple of times. Each time he leaves immediately, unprepared to watch it happen again.

It's easy to pass another century, fruitlessly searching for an escape and running from Eduardo like a haunting.

He's always enjoyed watching people change, but it gets more exciting as the second millennia approaches. Technology arrives and warps the world with its speed, and Mark – he's going to be stuck as part of this world for the rest of existence, quite probably, but he's not sitting all of it out. At the very least he values distraction.

It takes him a few years, but he establishes a full, complete identity for himself, down to high school history and letters of recommendation. He enrolls at Harvard because he's never attended university.

Eduardo finds him the second day of class. Mark isn't willing to run away and give everything up already. And for the first time in almost a century and a half, he feels ready to deal with everything Eduardo will bring with him.

It's easy to love him, because Mark never really stops; likewise, Eduardo catches onto him at their first meeting and never lets go.

It's just like always, but just like always, something goes wrong.

At least Mark doesn't have to watch him die.

Dustin or Chris would probably be overdramatic and say it's similar, only this time Mark was the one holding the knife. Mark doesn't care. All the betrayal in the world doesn't match the expression on Eduardo's face when he's dead, and Mark wasn't able to make himself run but at least now that Eduardo's left he _won't have to watch him die_.

He's glad, he really is. It wasn't his plan, not consciously, not that he'll ever admit, but he's not going to deny that underneath the guilt and frustration and impotent anger at the world, he's glad that for once Eduardo has to flee; that Eduardo is the one who has to feel the loss.

 

7.

He wonders, after a while: why Eduardo?

There's never really an explanation he can discern. There's no reason Eduardo should so obviously be drawn to him when he doesn't even remember their history. There's no reason for Mark to choose one person out of the millions and eventual billions in the world to love.

There's no explanation as to why they find each other, even when Mark doesn't mean to and Eduardo doesn't know to look.

It's the most important question he's ever had. His immortality is a close second. He thinks he'll never find an answer for either.

He thinks that's important, that the similarity matters, but he doesn't know how and he doesn't know why.

But still, the connection is there and the two are irrevocably linked, at least in his mind: Eduardo and Mark's immortality, the endless stream of life and life and life.

10.

But the anger and vindictive sense of justice don't hold. They barely hold for a year, much less half a decade, and then it's six years since Mark saw Eduardo outside a business capacity and he looks up and it's Eduardo's twenty-eighth birthday.

Dustin is standing in the doorway and asking if he's heard about Eduardo's mugging.

Singapore is a safe city, at least as far as any city – or any place with people at all, in Mark's opinion – can be safe. But even the slimmest statistical probability will find a way to manifest itself in Eduardo's case. Safety can't stand up to fate. Eduardo never sees his thirtieth birthday, and Singapore won't change that.

Mark flies over to see him in the hospital. Eduardo has more than a few visitors, and Mark makes sure to stay out of the way when they're there, but the rest of the time he sits in Eduardo's hospital room, watching the monitors beep.

Eduardo wakes up on the third day. Mark is out of the room because the nurses occasionally send him out for food and sleep, and also when they're cleaning the room and checking Eduardo's wound, and there's this one nurse who doesn't like him so she kicks him out just because. Mark listens to her, because she's doing her job and it probably deserves to have some perks; besides, she's one of the people keeping Eduardo alive, so he's not going to argue.

When Mark walks back in with a sandwich and a lukewarm soda, Eduardo is sitting up in bed and blinking at all the flowers surrounding him.

Which switches quickly to blinking at Mark for a split-second before he begins to frown. "What are you doing here?"

Mark shifts. "You were mugged."

"I remember," Eduardo says slowly. "What does that have to do with you?"

"You were stabbed," Mark elaborates.

"You were worried," Eduardo says. He tries to sit up further but winces, subsiding.

"Don't move," Mark says, exasperated. He steps closer to the bed. "You always move and make things worse."

"Do I," Eduardo says flatly. "And you're here because you're worried I might make things worse after I was stabbed."

"I was worried you'll die," Mark says.

"It's a small knife wound," Eduardo says. "It didn't hit any vital organs. People haven't died from wounds like this for hundreds of years. We have something called doctors."

Mark snorts. "You'd be surprised."

"Mark," Eduardo says, with an impressive effort put towards sounding angry. "I'm drugged up on pain meds and we're doing this now?"

"What?" Mark asks.

"Talking again?" Eduardo says. "Go away, I need to sleep."

"You can sleep with me here," Mark says stubbornly.

Eduardo falls asleep almost in the middle of rolling his eyes.

Mark doesn't leave.

He doesn't leave the next day, when Eduardo tells him to, and he doesn't leave at the end of the week, when Eduardo is released from the hospital and vehemently insists he's fine.

"I'm not letting you in my condo," Eduardo says. "So you have no choice but to go now."

"Do you have anyone to stay with you?" Mark says. "The nurse said you needed someone to stay with you."

"I know," Eduardo says. "Because she was talking to me when she said that. And yes, I do."

Mark frowns.

"Go," Eduardo says, but his face is soft.

"Call me," Mark says.

"Okay," Eduardo says slowly, bemusedly, but he doesn't go in his condo until the elevator doors close on Mark.

He keeps his promise and calls three days later.

Mark answers on the second ring, and even before hello, Eduardo says, "You sound – why are you awake?"

"What?" Mark asks blankly.

"It should be five in the morning for you," Eduardo says.

"Oh," Mark says.

"Are you…" Eduardo trails off suspiciously. "Did you _stay in Singapore_?"

"Why did you call now if you thought it'd be five a.m. for me?" Mark retorts, defensive.

Eduardo is silent, and then he admits, "I was hoping just to leave a message."

"I always answer my phone," Mark says triumphantly.

"Especially when you're in the same time zone so it's only 9 in the evening," Eduardo says, but he sounds almost fond.

"I wasn't going to leave," Mark repeats for the dozenth time.

Eduardo sighs and is silent for a while.

"Are you okay?" Mark asks. "Healing?"

"Yes," Eduardo says. "Almost healed."

"Good," Mark says. "Two more years."

"What?" Eduardo says.

Mark shakes his head though Eduardo can't see him.

"You need to go home," Eduardo says. "Don't think of it as leaving. You need to go back to California."

Mark doesn't _have_ to, exactly. He's got experience running companies from a distance, and Facebook becomes more self-sufficient by the day. But he also can't stay in a hotel room in a Singaporean high rise for the next two years, so Eduardo is somewhat correct.

"Go home," Eduardo says quietly. "And you can call me when you get there. I'll answer my phone."

"Yeah, okay," Mark says.

Eduardo does answer his phone. The first time, when Mark calls as soon as he gets off the plane, and the next time twelve hours later, and all the times after that. Mark calls two to three times a day, and Eduardo always answers, even if only to check in. He's clearly confused, but he's more cooperative than Mark thought he'd be.

And in between the check-ins, as Mark counts down to Eduardo's thirtieth birthday, they accidentally become friends again. Mark isn't even aware that's what has happened until one evening Eduardo calls first and starts complaining about his day the moment Mark answers without even a gesture at niceties.

Mark convinces Eduardo to come to California for his twenty-ninth birthday. He does it by lying about his own busy schedule and promising that he will blackmail Chris and Dustin into being available, not that they wouldn't be.

So Eduardo comes and stays for three days, and he smiles at Mark almost the whole time and he has only one more year until he's thirty, only one more year.

His flight out leaves Monday morning and Mark steals the ticket from his hand.

"No," Mark says.

"No?" Eduardo says, with a wry, amused smile.

"You can't," Mark says. "I'm not letting you leave."

"Now?" Eduardo says, wrinkling his nose a little. He's trying not to smile. "You want me to stay longer?"

"Ever," Mark says. "I want you to stay forever."

"I—Mark," Eduardo says. "I don't live here."

"You can't live without me," Mark says. "And maybe not with me, but it's better than without."

"I think I'm doing fine," Eduardo says. "Is this still about the mugging?"

"I can't live without you either," Mark says.

Eduardo stares at him.

"I'm sick of it," Mark says. "And I'm done. We'll go where you want and do what you want, but I get to keep you. Unconditionally."

"Mark," Eduardo says. He's still staring, but he's also leaning forward and forward and forward, and not away. "You realize you aren't making sense."

"Eduardo," Mark says, feeling like he's choking, like he's gasping for breath the same way he's gasping for Eduardo's agreement. "I need to be able to keep you."

"Mark," Eduardo says quietly back, but no less desperately, "Mark, calm down. It's okay."

His arms come around Mark, pulling him close, like Mark is the one who needs protecting.

Mark shakes his head blindly, kissing Eduardo's pulse point. Eduardo's hands go tight on his shoulders and Mark wonders if this will be too much too soon, if he will push Eduardo away without even meaning to. "I'm sorry," he says, and he means it for this lifetime and all the ones before, for everything he was too stupid to ever do right but too proud to admit he was doing wrong.

"Shh, Mark," Eduardo says, and his hands are smoothing up and down Mark's back, rhythmic and lulling. "It's okay."

It can't be that easy; Mark won't let it. He leans away, trying to meet Eduardo's eyes.

One of Eduardo's hands comes up, catching Mark's chin and stilling the automatic shake of disagreement. "Yes," he says. "Mark, it's okay. You need to learn to let things go. It's been long enough. I forgive you. We're here now, and it's okay."

"We're here now?" Mark forces out, and though Eduardo can't know what he's talking about, not really, he nods like he understands and says, "We've both been through enough."

11.

Eduardo is warm and almost glowing beside him when Mark wakes. Mark ignores the trick of the light and leans up into Eduardo for a kiss.

Eduardo kisses back and presses their foreheads together after, fingers trailing along Mark's jaw. It's a familiar gesture, and Mark's breath starts to catch.

"Are you going to stop punishing yourself?" Eduardo murmurs quietly.

Mark frowns, blinking his eyes open. He hadn't realized he'd shut them. "What?"

Eduardo's hand catches Mark's arm, and his grip hurts. Mark frowns harder, making a quiet displeased noise. It takes a lot to hurt him. When he holds it up in front of Mark, there are bruises in the shape of his fingers around Mark's wrist, dark and permanent. Millennia old.

Mark meets Eduardo's eyes and sees lifetimes that were never there before. "You," he says.

1.

"Can I keep you?" the boy asks.

Mark tilts his head back, drunken and tired, and sees someone near his own age smiling down at him.

The boy stoops. The fingers he trails along Mark's chin are cool with the dew on the grass. "You _are_ mine," he says. "Will you let me keep you?"

Mark lets himself be pulled up and led into the woods, though everyone knows that you shouldn't. No matter how you're chosen, you don't follow the magic into its own domain.

But Mark is getting married tomorrow to a girl of his father's choosing, and he has nothing to lose.

The boy pushes him up against a tree, holding him there, and his hands are hot like brands around Mark's wrists. "Can I keep you?" he says yet again, voice a soft pleading murmur as he kisses at Mark's mouth. "You're mine."

Mark kisses back and kisses back, breathless and overwhelmed. "I can't be yours," he gasps out, forces himself to say, because he's getting married tomorrow, he's getting married tomorrow, he can't forget.

The boy smiles and kisses him again, more fiercely, and he leaves a taste on Mark's tongue like golden fire. Mark swallows it down, keeps swallowing, and lets the boy pull them to the earth.

"Then I'll be yours," he says. "It's all the same to me."

Mark touches the boy's hair, and his eyes and his mouth and the rest of him, too. It's like being remade, everything Mark is molding against him, until they fit together unexpected and perfect.

Mark comes for the first time inside him, shaking and hot and utterly possessed, and the boy wraps around him and takes everything he is.

Mark comes back to himself, or something like himself, on the grass next to the boy, who is petting his face and smiling more peacefully than anything Mark's ever seen.

"I have waited so long to find you," he says dreamily, staring as if he isn't looking at Mark at all. "I'm so glad. I have so many things to show you."

Mark struggles to his feet, shaking off the boy's hands. "I have to—" he says.

The boy catches his wrist. "What?"

"I have to go," Mark says.

"Where?" the boy asks, face smoothing blank.

"I'm getting married tomorrow," Mark says. "I have to go to my wedding." He tugs at his wrist, trying to free himself.

"I don't understand," the boy says. "Why would you leave?"

"I have to," Mark says. "I have duties."

The boy's grip tightens, fingers grinding in until Mark can't help but cry out, dropping to his knees. The grip doesn't loosen once he's down, and Mark thinks his wrist will be broken.

"You can't go," the boy says. "You're mine."

"No," Mark says, through gritted teeth. "I'm not."

"Yes," the boy says. "Of course you are, can't you feel it? You promised you would keep me."

"I won't be the pet of a forest spirit," Mark hisses.

It isn't until the boy says, "Forest spirit?" voice dark, that Mark looks at him again and realizes his mistake.

"Oh," he gasps out, as the boy's eyes sharpen with the same molten gold, unbanked magic unfurling inside him, possessing its shell entirely.

"Oh," Mark gasps out again, but it means nothing this time except that he can feel the knife sliding between his ribs more than he thought he would.

He stares down at it, going limp. The gilt handle is melting liquid, sliding down the blade to slip inside his wound, curling hot like a snake in his chest. It meets the magic already burning though him, marking him, and sparks it into life.

It's the heat of it all that makes Mark scream.

"I'm going to keep you," the magic says, staring down dangerous and unforgiving. "You'll learn. You'll remember. You're mine."

"Why?" Mark forces out.

"You promised," the magic says. "We need each other now."

Mark shakes his head. "Why?" His voice sounds sick and wet.

The magic looks, of all things, sad. "I have to teach you. You have to learn. It's up to you now."

Mark gasps, struggling for breath. The pain isn't so searing anymore. The heat is dissipating, floating away like it never was. But Mark knows it's there, waiting, coiled inside as permanently as his own soul. Part of his own soul, now.

The magic touches his face. "Don't worry," he says, and his kiss is still the most addicting thing Mark has ever tasted. "I'll be with you every step of the way."

 

100.

A lot of things are still unexpected, especially when the world keeps changing.

But Mark and Eduardo change with it, and it turns out eternity isn't so bad. Not that Mark ever thought it was – that was all Eduardo's hang up, and really the root of all their problems. Mark forgives him, though.

Even if he didn't, he would when he passes his third millennia and Facebook is still thriving. He forgets it entirely when, instead of exploring the world, he and Eduardo can start exploring the universe.

Mark doesn't believe magic is natural. He knows he and Eduardo certainly aren't. However, it turns out the rest of it is all true: there is magic, and there are at least some magical creatures, and the world still works in ways he can't understand no matter how much he tries.

It's a little disappointing that Eduardo doesn't know either, but at least it keeps things interesting. They'll find the answer eventually.


End file.
